First Quilt of 2012

It’s the end of the first week of January and I already have my first quilt of 2012 finished. Of course, that means it was mostly made in 2011. This quilt was my traveling project over the Christmas holidays as I worked on the hand-quilting, because it had a firm and fast deadline of January 7th. Today my good friend Tina is marrying Arthur and we get to be there to celebrate.

This quilt is called Irish Road and is from a fat quarter book I picked up at a library book sale this summer. It’s made all of one block, rotated in different directions when they are put together. The block has 6 different batik fabrics, with a white square moving through them.
Of course I can’t leave a pattern well enough alone, so enlarged the block size to 9″ and doubled the amount of blocks to make it the size I like for lap quilts, 56 x 72 for this one.
There were more possible layouts then I thought, but with Matt’s help I settled on one that had alternating centers of the blue fabric, and the green fern fabric.

I finished piecing it on December 1st. Here it is hanging over the railing.
That gave me just over a month to hand quilt it. I decided that I wanted to stretch my quilting skills so in each of the blue centers, I quilted a circle with feathers.
The green centers were fewer and cut in half along the edges, so there I stitched in the ditch. I quilted a diagonal line through all the white squares and an off set line in the white border.

I’m thankful that our families didn’t mind me visiting with a quilt on my lap. I finished the hand quilting the day before we returned, exactly one month. It was just in time to come home and sew on the binding.

It seems to go well with the neutral winter colors we have outside right now, with or without a dusting of snow.

The back is one large piece of the striped green fabric.

My one lesson from this quilt is that if I’m going to do fancy designs with the quilting, I need to leave myself solid colored fabric areas where it will show up better. Hopefully I’ll remember that when I design the next quilt.

6 Responses to First Quilt of 2012

Love it! You are one talented lady! You really have a good eye for color. As soon as I get my house cleaned up. I’m going to start a quilt for our bed. It’s been almost 20 years since I made my last quilt. I think that I may quilt this one on the machine. I have never quilted on the machine, only by hand. What I have noticed is that once the quilt is a little older, you can’t see all of the pretty quilting designs.

Keep posting all of your wonderful creations…it will get me motivated to get started!

I lay out all the layers and then I pin them together. They sell slightly bent safety pins that allow you to pin more easily through all the layers and back up again. Once it’s pinned I don’t worry too much about the layers shifting.